Chris and I had a simple plan that day in London. First, we would go to The Photographer’s Gallery, a  free museum just off Oxford Street that houses changing photography shows.  We’ve seen a couple of interesting shows there in the past, so we thought we’d check it out.  But we knew that it wouldn’t take that long to visit, unlike the British Museum or the Louvre, for example. So, our plan was to have a quick-lunch in the cafe at The Photographer’s Gallery, and then head across town to see the remains of the Roman amphitheater in London.

What, you didn’t know that London had ruins of a Roman amphitheater?  Well, neither did we until this trip, when Chris ran across the information that there were ruins of a Roman amphitheater in the London Guild Hall. Chris and I are suckers for seeing ruins of a Roman amphitheater; after all, one of our favorite places to visit is Verona, where the Roman amphitheater is still in use today.

But realizing that the London amphitheater remains weren’t quite that large, we figured it would be  easy to do it in the afternoon on the day we went to The Photographer’s Gallery. So we looked on the Guild website for directions on how to get there, and noted that the directions said to take Bus 25 along Oxford Street to the Cheapside bus stop.

Now,  Oxford Street was, as I said, not far from The Photographer’s Gallery. So this would be easy right? We found the right bus stop near the gallery,  and after waiting just a few minutes the Bus 25 pulled up.  We hopped on, and got a front-row seat on the upper level of the double-decker bus. Perfect. It’s just great when a plan comes together, right?

Except …

After travelling just a couple of blocks on Oxford Street , the bus got stuck in traffic. Thanks to some amazingly stupid timing of the traffic lights at one intersection, our bus would up stuck for 30 minutes in one place.  30 minutes! Or maybe even more; I don’t recall exactly, but Chris thinks it might have been more.

Anyway, since we weren’t at a bus stop, it wasn’t easy to get off the bus, although we probably could have walked to where we were headed in the time we spent on the bus, stuck in that one spot.

The waiting it wasn’t made any easier to deal with by the guy across the aisle. He was accompanying his sick friend home from her doctor’s appointment. She looked just miserable, and was probably not helped by his non-stop monologue delivered in the most irritatingly loud voice imaginable.

Ah well. That’s the chance you take when you ride public transport, I guess.

Anyway, after a very long time the bus finally made it through that intersection, and we were at last moving through the streets of London again.  The bus had a nice on-board display of the current stop name, so we waited for the Cheapside stop to show up.

And waited. And waited.  We started to realize that some of the area we were passing through was — we thought — fairly  close to the Guild Hall where we were going, so we anticipated the Cheapside stop any time now.

But then we saw that there was a detour on the road the bus was following. Suddenly on-board  display with the bus stop names stopped updating.  Before we could pull out our London map to see where we were, we were suddenly in a very different part of town.

Now, it wasn’t exactly a dangerous-looking part to be sure. But it wasn’t a touristy part of town; and something about the streets looked a bit dodgy, to use the British term.  Chris and I headed down to the lower level of the bus and asked the bus-driver when we were going to get to the Cheapside stop. And he said, “Cheapside? You missed it. We passed that quite a while ago!”

But … but… no stop called Cheapside was ever announced. We were sure of that. What the heck had happened?!

Anyway, as the street had by this time turned into a one-way roadway,  the driver suggested that at the next stop we should get off and  walk around the block to the next street over in order to find a bus going back in the other direction toward Cheapside.

Right. OK. So, we got off the bus, and made our way over the first bus stop we saw on the other street. A bus was sitting there, so we asked that driver if he was going toward Cheapside, and if not, which bus did go there.  He said he didn’t know, but we should ask the guy standing on the street behind us.

Um, what?

Turned out that the guy behind us was an off-duty bus driver, but still, that just seemed like the craziest thing for the bus driver to say at the time. The guy on the street told us to go look at a map that was posted further up the street. The map didn’t have Cheapside on it, nor the Guild Hall. But we did spot another bus stop further up the street. There we waited until another Bus 25 came along.  We asked this bus driver if her bus was going to Cheapside. She said no, her bus was going to end at the stop before Cheapside, and that we should wait for the next bus, although she couldn’t say for sure when that would be coming. However, this neighborhood just didn’t seem like the place for random, lost tourists to be hanging out in for long periods of time, so we hopped on this new Bus 25 that was going to end before Cheapside.

When we got to the end of the line, the driver kindly pointed out what street we should follow to walk up to get to the Guild Hall. Along the way, we passed by a Bus 25 bus stop near there, the one that the Guild Hall’s website referred to as “Cheapside”.  On the bus stop sign, though, it was called “Cheapside/Poultry”.  Chris and I read that and then looked at each other.  We both clearly remembered the first bus stopping a Poultry.  But on the bus the sign only said Poultry; and the info on the website for the Guild Hall had only said Cheapside.

Sigh.

Anyway, after 1.5 hours we finally made it the Guild Hall to see London’s Roman Amphitheater ruins.  It took us 90 minutes to get there … and maybe 90 seconds to see the ruins.

OK, well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. We might have spent a total of 9 minutes there, since I needed to take a few photos after all, of course. There’s not much to the actual ruins, but the bizarre neon gladiator display was worthy of a photo or two.

Plus, the Guild Hall had a copy of the Magna Carta on display, and that was kind of fun to see, so I’ve included a photo of that, too, in the gallery below.

But let’s just say I don’t recommend putting the Roman Amphitheatre ruins high on your list of tourist things to visit in London.

On the other hand,  if you want a bit of an adventure in London, I can recommend you try your luck on Bus 25.